Is there a future at all?

[Mastix]

I don't get why are you guyz taking it all to the heart, yea I can see the little badges near your names with all the beta-testing etc... must mean you love and care about Introversion more than the others...
I am bringing Valid-arguement, wanting the basic featurues that any Strategy-Multiplayer game have, and you just bash me with every "Internet 1337" power you have.
I do think that Introversion games are great, but something that is great (well, Multiwinia is not as great... it's more in the... Good direction) sometimes still needs an improvement.
I do not want to fight with any of you and I'm sorry if I harmed your gentle IV loving hearts...

[Jordy...]

there just bored kids with some kind of master degree about how to waiste your time on useless forums. Don't care for them.

[The GoldFish]

Hello I am a reasonable individual that is here to talk about this subject.

But, is there any point in my doing so? You guys seem pretty determined to slag one another off, so maybe I shouldn't bother.

[Mastix]

Hello I am a reasonable individual that is here to talk about this subject.

But, is there any point in my doing so? You guys seem pretty determined to slag one another off, so maybe I shouldn't bother.

I'm all ears.

[Xocrates]

Now that things have quieted down a bit, and in the chance that at no point this was an attempt at trolling, I would like to try and exposit what happened.

I admit, I had a big part on the downgrading of the thread, it didn't help that I wasn't in a good mood and less so when it become entertaining enough to troll feed to alleviate the boredom.

Mastix original post had a reasonable point. However upon various replies pointing that IV have other major worries than continuing support of Multiwinia right now, he expresses himself disappointed (understandable), but goes on to imply IV's overall support sucks.

Things downgrade quickly from here for a simple reason: While IV's support is entirely reasonable, Mastix acts with a sense of Entitlement he ostensibly doesn't have, no matter how differently he thinks so (unfortunately this sense of entitlement is extremely widespread. Hence my "hate gamers" post).

All his questions were answered (admittedly, not always in the friendliest of terms), but just in case he missed them:

1) IV has bigger concerns right now
2) Map editor in the making, please have patience
3) Multiwinia has, in fact, basic moddability

[elexis]

wow, I can't believe that womeone went out of their way to make the last four pages legible! Thanks for that.

Maybe we need a general faq on the forums that that has all th answers to the questions that seem to be asked weekly.

[Jordy...]

This is unacceptable Xocrates, really, this is not good. Do we waiste or time with trolling or what!?! I do have to complain about you seriousness, and also even implying yourself!!! saying sorry making excuses?!!?! WTF!!!!!!!! Go back and edit that stupid post

[Mastix]

Now that things have quieted down a bit, and in the chance that at no point this was an attempt at trolling, I would like to try and exposit what happened.

I admit, I had a big part on the downgrading of the thread, it didn't help that I wasn't in a good mood and less so when it become entertaining enough to troll feed to alleviate the boredom.

Mastix original post had a reasonable point. However upon various replies pointing that IV have other major worries than continuing support of Multiwinia right now, he expresses himself disappointed (understandable), but goes on to imply IV's overall support sucks.

Things downgrade quickly from here for a simple reason: While IV's support is entirely reasonable, Mastix acts with a sense of Entitlement he ostensibly doesn't have, no matter how differently he thinks so (unfortunately this sense of entitlement is extremely widespread. Hence my "hate gamers" post).

All his questions were answered (admittedly, not always in the friendliest of terms), but just in case he missed them:

1) IV has bigger concerns right now
2) Map editor in the making, please have patience
3) Multiwinia has, in fact, basic moddability

Mastix acts with a sense of Entitlement he ostensibly doesn't have - Care to elaborate? (my english isn't perfect).

[NeatNit]

Now that things have quieted down a bit, and in the chance that at no point this was an attempt at trolling, I would like to try and exposit what happened.

I admit, I had a big part on the downgrading of the thread, it didn't help that I wasn't in a good mood and less so when it become entertaining enough to troll feed to alleviate the boredom.

Mastix original post had a reasonable point. However upon various replies pointing that IV have other major worries than continuing support of Multiwinia right now, he expresses himself disappointed (understandable), but goes on to imply IV's overall support sucks.

Things downgrade quickly from here for a simple reason: While IV's support is entirely reasonable, Mastix acts with a sense of Entitlement he ostensibly doesn't have, no matter how differently he thinks so (unfortunately this sense of entitlement is extremely widespread. Hence my "hate gamers" post).

All his questions were answered (admittedly, not always in the friendliest of terms), but just in case he missed them:

1) IV has bigger concerns right now
2) Map editor in the making, please have patience
3) Multiwinia has, in fact, basic moddability

Mastix acts with a sense of Entitlement he ostensibly doesn't have - Care to elaborate? (my english isn't perfect).

Yes. You think you deserve the map editor and more updates, when you really don't.

[The GoldFish]

I have the impression that at this stage, IV are really out of touch with the community - this is not really a big change.

So far as I'm aware, MW is as "abandoned" as any other IV game is. In the "worst case", Darwinia only saw updates past 1.2 (which was pretty much the 'patch after release' patch, which included a ton of bug fixes and a fix to let you load custom strings in mods) when it was for a push to get a new demo out to attract people, to get it on Steam and sell in foreign markets, and then to get it on MSN games. Pretty much all of these updates were market driven. Comparitively, Uplink and Defcon (eventually) received a lot of updates which added stability, speed and consistancy to the game, I think this was mostly thanks to Frenchfrog but I could be wrong.

Now, that's not to say there's anything wrong with market driven updates - a lot of features did make it into those Darwinia updates, but, a lot didn't, and it left people who wanted to mod for Darwinia a bit stuck (for the exact reasons IV found it difficult to make the game in the first place). AFAIK, Darwinia was the red headed stepchild when it came to sales, and didn't sell as well as Uplink or Defcon did, so maybe there is a pattern there.

Chances are, at this stage, we'll only see an update to Multiwinia if it is effectively marketable and will get the game sufficient publicitiy to supply extra sales to finance the development of said update, as otherwise there's no money in it. On top of this, all the devs at IV have been working on the Darwinia/Multiwinia codebase for D+ for quite a long time now, and they're probably sick of it by now, so, it's unlikely that they'll even *want* to go back to Multiwinia and finish the map editor up for release even if they had the resources to do so. Honestly I can't see any reason why IV would come back to Multiwinia at this stage, so yes I would say that chances are there is no future, and if there is it will not be especially interesting.

Unfortunately, IV tend to not seem to like to talk at any length to individuals like me (or even the community at large), who offer them help with things (or at least that has been my experience), unless you give them a full working idea for something - I've never been able to really work out/talk at length about something with any member of their staff - maybe that's because I'm always far too verbose/wall of text about it all. Now OK, Bert and Jelco have done some pretty huge things for Multiwinia, with some help from IV about game specifics, and I put together the (technically currently pretty useless) community texture pack for map makers to use in their maps, and have made numerous posts to try and help people who want to make maps make maps, but without IV supporting those things right now that's pretty much a dead end, and the lack of support rubs off on me and makes me disinterested too.

I mean let's be realistic; if they'd wanted to have map updates every month or so, did they turn to the community and ask the experienced map makers to help them do that? Nope. Did they ever make the Multiwinia Tshirts? Nope. Have they hired someone under the apparent guise of "Community Management" who does basically nothing at all to do with community management? Yes. Did they ask around the community if anyone wanted to do that job for them, for free? Nope. Did this ever happen? Nope (and will it ever?).

They seem relatively internal when it comes to accomplishing anything, so only IV know their own motivations. I would say that really they don't seem to know what they're doing, have some nice ideas and find they can't follow them through, and just don't know how to say "Actually, sorry, we're so busy with X we just don't have time for this right now, and to be honest, we might never have time to do it" and realise they're leaving people, their supporters, hanging when they don't do this.

They probably don't want to turn their back on you; by buying their game you're supporting them, and that means they like you, after all. There might be some crossover with additional Multiwinia updates due to Darwinia+'s development and release (they used to use the same codebase so if there are things they can port over at little cost (both time and money) then that is something you might see, but beyond that I can't imagine we'll be seeing any updates to Multiwinia beyond the map editor (and that's only even a maybe at this stage); even single man days are expensive to an indipendant dev house, especially one so close to apparently collapsing. But make no mistake; not being able to afford to support the game in the ways both the community and the devs would like to see is, basically, turning their back on you, if they don't try to find a way to let the community support itself, which they apparently never have.

So yes, frankly their support sucks right now, and honestly, it probably always will, at least for Multiwinia, because thus far they don't seem to know how to design a game to make long term support easier. If there were a game breaking bug discovered, it would probably get fixed (then again, maybe it wouldn't, re blitz reinforcement sync error...), but, that's about it. I would expect to have to take Multiwinia "as-is" for quite a long time (ie shortlived and difficult to play online due to lack of opponents), and even if one day the ME does get released, it's probably far too late for anyone to still care.

[NeatNit]

tl;dr

[Mastix]

So, when developers say to their community that they will release a map editor, and as one the replies here said, that should have been in the 1st release, they shouldn't?
I mean, ofcourse they don't owe to me, or to any of you... "followers" crap, but isn't that what people call... bad support? (I DIDN'T SAY THAT THEY PROMISED AND THEY WON'T KEEP THEIR PROMISE, IT'S WHAT THE ABOVE REPLY SUGGEST).
I agree that I might have "overasked" stuff, I'm used to a more luxurious treating from Mod teams and Indie developers and even from AAA companies, I do agree that IV Support isn't total crap, and that they are a... good company overall.
But You both turned this into "Bash The Critisism" fanboy thread, and I helped you to take this thread into the grave.
So both sides have guilt, and we can stop the argue here.
Anyone up for a game of Multiwinia?
Edit: After reading The GoldFish long and very good explained thread, It made me think, that this might be a pretty big cause to why Multiwinia failed in sales.

[xander]

This is one of the funnier threads I have seen here. I love it. Two thumbs up. Five stars. I'll be back in a minute---I just need to get some graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate so that I can make some s'mores. Keep on flaming, dudes!

xander

[NeatNit]

Suddenly in a good mood, huh?

[Mastix]

This is one of the funnier threads I have seen here. I love it. Two thumbs up. Five stars. I'll be back in a minute---I just need to get some graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate so that I can make some s'mores. Keep on flaming, dudes!

xander

You are a funny guy...!